Staging instances (Shadows)

Shadows

Shadows are a unique feature in Seravo that provides you with non-public instances of your website for testing and development purposes. Shadows are throw-away copies of the main site. You can reset the shadow to be a fresh copy of the main site at any time (with wp-shadow-reset), and do whatever testing and experiments in the shadow you wish without risking anything on the real live production site.

The shadows appear to have the same address as the real site, so it is as a true copy of the real site as possible. However, thanks to special routing, shadows are not the live site despite the appearance.

Shadows are not intended to be permanent. You should use it like a testing instance of the website. If a shadow is unused for en extended time, Seravo may delete it.

Getting a Shadow

Email us at help@seravo.com and ask us for a shadow instance. You will have one opened up for you in no time.

It’s also possible to have your own domain or subdomain for the staging environment. Please note that this shadows with their own domain is still in development so some functionalities are not yet fully implemented and there are known bugs. For example the command wp-shadow-reset and the Exit Staging button do not currently work with a staging environment using its own domain.

In later revisions of this feature, you will be able to create on-demand shadows via the WordPress admin dashboard and the Seravo plugin.

Using a Shadow

The Seravo Plugin

The Instance Switcher module in the Seravo plugin adds a simple interface to your WP-admin view, that allows you to easily switch between your Shadow and Production instances.

SSH/SFTP

You can SSH into your shadows and work on them via SSH/SFTP or git. When a new shadow is created you will receive the SSH/SFTP credentials to use with it.

Your WordPress login will remain unchanged, since the site is a copy of your production site when first created.

You can tell that you’re in a shadow by looking at the WP_ENV environment variable. If you’re in a shadow, it will be staging or testing, depending on what’s applicable in your situation. Your production instance will have a WP_ENV value of production. Local Vagrant images and the like will have WP_ENV value development.

example_456def$ wp-list-env
...
WP_ENV: staging

Reset the Shadow environment

Command line option (via SSH)

You can use the command wp-shadow-reset to copy the current production site over the chosen staging instance. The command has to be run on the production server.

user@example_456def:~$ wp-shadow-reset
No shadow specified, please run "wp-shadow-reset <shadow>" with one of the shadows below:
- example_123abc
- example_456def

The command requires you to choose the shadow environment you want to reset. The system will then ask if it’s okay for you that the database and all files in /data/wordpress will be replaced with data from the production site.

After choosing yes, the shadow will be reset.

Graphical option (via wp-admin)

In the WordPress admin area you can open the page Tools > Shadows to view a list of the shadows that currenlty exist for a site. Resetting them to be a fresh copy of the production site can be done with a click of a button.

How does it work?

Under the hood, shadows work exactly the same as your production instance does, the only difference being that they have no public domain mapped to them.

Shadows have their own full Linux environment and their own database, completely separate from your production instance. You can use SSH to work on your shadow instances in precisely the same way as you can with your production instance.

The Shadow Cookie

To view your shadow in the browser, a special cookie called seravo_shadow must be set.

The value of the seravo_shadow cookie determines which shadow instance will be served to your browser.

Example:

example_123abc (production)
example_456def (staging)

Setting a cookie seravo_shadow=456def;path=/ will return the staging instance to your browser.